Like the Holy Roman Empire, this Friday Random Ten is neither Friday, nor Random, nor Ten. But it is (I think) a good idea;
thanks to Random Thoughts and to Trish Wilson for it. Here’s the idea: you’ve probably all heard of the Friday Random Ten music game. This is sort of like that, except that it’s ten links. The links go to ten worthy posts by webloggers outside of the usual club of folks you link to. Why? Because weblogging, and political weblogging in particular, is interesting and fun and increasingly important but it’s also got a tendency to be inbred and clubby. Most of us are not atop the A-list “dominant link hierarchy,” but we participate in it, and if we don’t try to break up the cartel a bit, who will? The Danny Bonaduce of the blogosphere? I think not. So here’s mine:

When it comes to the hand-wringing and the bloviating over the Left’s attitude towards feminism, abortion, and sexuality, media girl 2005-02-24: Not negotiable puts it better than I could in just three sentences:

What a lot people — mostly men — don’t seem to understand is that women’s control over our own bodies is not negotiable. We are not slaves. We are not breeding machines to be regulated and controlled by the government.

Ohlook. We have another well-meaning non-sexist liberal
non-discriminatory fuckwit around being all concerned about
how women just don’t choose to talk about politics. Or maybe
it’s that they’re innately less comfortable with the “food
fight” nature of political discourse.

How the fuck do men ever manage to succeed in any kind of
intellectual endeavor without bothering to find out what the
fuck they’re talking about before shooting their mouths off?
Oh yeah, right, it’s the magic power of the cock. Jesus.

Bean has a new blog (you may know her from her posts on Alas, A Blog), and in Cool Beans 2005-03-03: The Invisibility of Feminism she points to another one for the what is seen and what is not seen file. Here we have one of the countless examples of why men in the media seem able to confidently declare feminism dead once every five years or so, without the least bit of circumspection: because nobody seems to feel obligated to actually, y’know, look up feminist publications before they gather their data and start spouting off.

Hanna Wallach posted
her
slides from a talk she gave on Debian Women yesterday. She
showed statistics showing that 10-20% of computer science
undergrads are women, and that 20-35% of IT professionals are
women, and yet there are only 4-8 women among the nearly 1000
developers of the open source Debian "universal"
operating system. That’s less than one percent. While Hanna
mentions possible reasons briefly, her main concern in the
talk is to show what is being done in Debian Women.

It’s good to see that the topic is being addressed, and everyone’s best wishes should be with Debian Women, which seems to be off to a good running start; one can only pray that the boys will keep tabs on the organizing and action that’s going on, instead of treating everyone to a trimonthly outbreak of oblivious Where are all the female software developers? e-mails on devel mailing lists…

From iVillage and by Richie Sambora. Sambora couldn’t tell you
shit about playing guitar, and he’s a
guitarist. So why do we assume he knows something about being a
man? As usual, we women are presumed pretty clueless when it
comes to men. Men, however, know everything they need to know
about us.

…

We want you to be our mothers.

Heather Locklear is a saint. And now I have the unfortunate
image of her man calling her Mommy and I’m all upset.

We don’t mind it when you dress us.

If he asks for a sponge bath next, I hope Locklear takes a
moment to remember that she is a stunning beauty who has
exactly zero reason to fear that she’s headed for spinsterhood
if she suddenly gave up playing Airplane in order to get her
husband to eat.

Avedon Carol 205-03-05: How you become crazy takes on the pervasive idiot notion that any ideological skew in the media, if it exists, is prima facie evidence that the media is doing something wrong and therefore needs to change:

I have never understood why this should be a criticism of the
media, anymore than it makes sense that this is a negative
trait of academe; if the people who are best educated and
most aware of what is going on are more liberal, maybe that’s
because you have to be ignorant to swallow conservatism. What
is really suggested by this “criticism” is that the alleged
“bias” isn’t bias at all, it’s just a recognition of what is,
and that bias is required to lean to the right of this
“liberal” position. Indeed, the behavior we’re seeing from
the administration is fairly explicit in that we are told
that simple facts are “biased”. The news media are not
supposed to tell the public the truth about anything because
that would bias us against the administration. The real
question is not, then, about a bias toward liberalism or
conservatism, but rather a belief that “news” should make
some attempt to serve the public rather than just the
corporate hierarchy.

…

Those people really do need reminders. They need to be told
every single time they spew right-wing bull. They need to be
reminded over and over that reality still holds sway for at
least half of the population. Most of all, they need to be
told that we’re not talking about forgetfulness and errors
and “misstatements” from Condi and George and friends, we’re
talking about lying, and they should call a spade a spade.

Whether Avedon’s right or not about all that (I think she’s clearly right about the media’s limitless charity for Bush administration fraudsters, probably right about some parts of reporters’ policy skew, and probably mistaken about others), the underlying point is awfully damned important: the demographic arguments that “liberal media” bloviators (and their “corporate media” comrades on the Left) aren’t enough to show anything in particular. The perverse sort of ideological identity politics that the Right especially loves these days needs to be called for what it is: pure bluff.

Then he went on to flagellate that old tired concept that
everyone knows is a lie: The Vicious Liberal Media. His
commentator? The resentful Ari Fleischer, clearly still
smarting from his days as White House Press Secretary

Clancy at CultureCat 2005-03-04: Orphan Works: Tell the Copyright Office Your Stories calls for shedding light on one of the rarely-seen but often-onerous unintended consequences of the intellectual enclosure regime: valuable works are left in limbo when you can’t find their copyright holders. I’m sure that making works completely impossible to reproduce for a good 70 years or so is really incentivizing some creative excellence. Somehow.

Micha Ghertner at Catallarchy 2005-03-06: Small Is Beautiful points out something that you just don’t see in most discussions of prying education out of the hands of the bureaucratic State: the way that government monopolization of schools and politicized pressures constrict schools into multimillion dollar all-things-to-all-people facilities–thus forcing down the number of groups that could reasonably get a school off the ground–thus forcing them into crowded splinding-and-sorting centers for thousands of students:

Would people want to send their kids to small, simple, less
expensive schools? Would some parents drop off their kids at an
individualized schooling program for a few hours, and then take
them to the gym or the community center for a sports league or
a friendly pick-up game with other children? Those who are
satisfied with the current system of institutionalized
babysitting may want to stick with the status quo. Those who
would prefer a close-knit atmosphere, where everyone knows each
other by name, and where the programs and costs are specially
tailored to each individual student’s needs, may conclude that
bigger is not always better.

Some fifteen or eighteen years ago, when I had not been out of
the convent long enough to forget its teachings, nor lived and
experienced enough to work out my own definitions, I considered
that marriage was a sacrament of the Church or it was
civil ceremony performed by the State, by which a man
and a woman were united for life, or until the divorce court
separated them. With all the energy of a neophyte freethinker,
I attacked religious marriage as an unwarranted interference on
the part of the priest with the affairs of individuals,
condemned the until death do us part promise as one of
the immoralities which made a person a slave through all his
future to his present feelings, and urged the miserable
vulgarity of both the religious and civil ceremony, by which
the intimate personal relations of two individuals are made
topic of comment and jest by the public.

By all this I still hold. Nothing is more disgustingly vulgar
to me than the so-called sacrament of marriage; outraging of
all delicacy in the trumpeting of private matters in the
general ear. Need I recall, for example, the unprinted and
unprintable floating literature concerning the marriage of
Alice Roosevelt, when the so-called American princess
was targeted by every lewd jester in the country, because,
forsooth, the whole world had to be informed of her forthcoming
union with Mr. Longworth! But it is neither the religious nor
the civil ceremony that I refer to now, when I say that
those who marry do ill. The ceremony is only a form, a
ghost, a meatless shell. By marriage I mean the real thing, the
permanent relation of a man and a woman, sexual and economical,
whereby the present home and family life is maintained. It is
of no importance to me whether this is a polygamous, polyandric
or monogamous marriage, nor whether it is blessed by a priest,
permitted by a magistrate, contracted publicly or privately, or
not contracted at all. It is the permanent dependent
relationship which, I affirm, is detrimental to the growth of
individual character, and to which I am unequivocally opposed.
Now my opponents know where to find me.

O.K.; that was eleven, not ten. And the eleventh isn’t exactly a blog link anyway. But I did warn you ahead of time that Friday Random Ten would be a name here, not a definite description. And if the dominant link hierarchy in the weblog world is worth breaking up, then I’d have to say that it’s also worth breaking up weblog reading with a bit of material that was written before the turn of the 21st century. Enjoy the subversion!

—Rad Geek

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Subversive ideas found here, here, and here. Blondesense is doing a series proving that the claims that the 10 Commandments are the basis of our law are false. Bean has a two part post examining why victims of domestic violence…

Well, “bloviating” is one of my favorite words (in part because it gets at something important and all too frequent in today’s culture; also because it does so while nicely suggesting “blowhard” and “bluff” to the ears). A lot of my favorite writing is deflationary–stuff that cuts through a big mess of nonsense with the simple truth. (Stuff like Ellen Willis’s Women and the Myth of Consumerism or Lucinda Cisler’s Abortion law repeal (sort of), for example.). Partly because I think most moral and political truths are simpler than people–especially men trying to make excuses for themselves–tend to think, and partly because longwindedness is so often a vice of my own that I especially admire people who knock it out of the park in a couple of sentences. Which is why I liked your post and the post that you quoted as much as I did: there’s so much talk surrounding abortion (on both sides) that’s just pure blabber,–blame games and strategic hand-wringing and bald opportunism–but this is the argument that cuts straight through the nonsense every time. Abortion rights advocates should be unapologetic and uncompromising because your body belongs to you, not to Jerry Falwell.

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